


Mornings After Nights Before

by Faebreath



Category: What We Do in the Shadows (2014)
Genre: Blood, First Kiss, Friends to Lovers, Graphic Descriptions of Injuries, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Stu's a sweetie, Vomiting, no-cameraman AU I guess?, swearwolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-15
Updated: 2019-05-15
Packaged: 2020-03-06 02:47:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18842059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Faebreath/pseuds/Faebreath
Summary: Stu looks after the newly-not-quite-dead Nick. Several months and a werewolf attack later, Nick returns the favour.





	Mornings After Nights Before

Nick wakes up in his own bed and he thinks _oh thank fuck it was only a dream_ and he goes to have a piss and he glances at his reflection in the mirror as he snaps the light on and he sees his eyes are bleeding. Heaps. Like, a fucking _lot_.

“Oh shit,” he says, and sort of half-faints, grabbing at the rim of the sink to stop himself falling, it looks like the tiled floor is breathing, heaving up and down, and the blood is splattering onto it and it’s soaking into the furry white bathmat. “Oh, oh shit,” he says, bile coming up into his throat.

He means to get to the bed, but ends up on the ceiling, looking down at it. Well, that makes sense; the room keeps flipping over itself anyway. Now the blood’s dripping all over the sheets, the pillows. Nick thinks one person shouldn’t be able to lose this much blood, which makes him remember the hole in his neck, which makes him remember the vampire.

He loses some time after that. Then he’s on the phone. “Stu. I think, I think I’m freaking out.”

Stu arrives and cleans him up and cleans the bed up and puts him in it, with a wastepaper bin on one side. He cleans the bathroom, and the bright white light in the little room in the dark apartment reminds Nick of an angel, visiting.

“It’s a bad fucking trip, Stu,” he says, several times, and without being asked.

“Uh-huh,” says Stu. He doesn’t mention the blood, or the hole in his neck, after Nick waves a hospital wristband in his face. He just does what Stu does, which is help.

He wakes up in the morning to the swishing of the washing machine and a small pile of buttered toast. Later, he’ll thank him, a bit awkwardly, and Stu will shrug and point out he’d do the same for him.

* * *

Stu wakes up and he knows it wasn’t a dream because he’s not in his own bed, he’s on Anton’s tired old brown sofa with an itchy blanket and somebody else’s tracksuit bottoms on. First he looks at the light on Anton’s living room ceiling, then he thinks _I died and now I’m a werewolf_ , and then he notices a large mug of tea steaming on the coffee table next to it, along with two neatly-placed paracetamol.

“Thanks,” he says to the room at large.

“No worries,” says Anton, checkered apron tied around his waist, poking his head out of the kitchen door. “I’m making breakfast. Scrambled eggs okay?”

“Uh, yes. Yeah. Thanks,” says Stu. He’s not quite sure what to say after that, so he takes a gulp of tea. It hits, scalding, one of the new scars (or not-quite-scars) that starts at the corner of his mouth; he winces. Then he touches it, feeling it hurt, and follows the raised line of it up to underneath his eye. From it he finds more, branching off, crossing themselves.

Anton comes out of the kitchen with a plate of eggs and sees Stu tracing the edges of cut skin, eyes looking at nothing.

“You okay, mate?”

Stu doesn’t say anything.

“Is there anyone I can call?”

Stu finds the end of one of them, just under his hair.

“Yeah, actually.”

Forty-five minutes later he’s on Nick’s sofa, looking at a ceiling that he knows, that reminds him of drunken nights and stoned nights, of nights where they hadn’t needed anything to keep them up past dawn, talking about everything, talking about nothing.

“I almost just told him to fuck off, and hung up,” says Nick, who’s sitting next to where Stu’s lying with his legs pulled up to his chest. “Anton, I mean.” Stu cracks a smile. 

He hadn’t, and when he’d heard Stu’s voice he’d been out of bed and halfway into his jeans, scrabbling for his car keys, before Stu reminded him that it was one in the afternoon and to not set himself on fire, please.

“I’m glad you didn’t.”

“Yeah.” Nick leant his hands on his knees, looking at them. “I’m glad I didn’t, too.”

They sit. Nick thinks about patting Stu’s knee, but doesn’t. He thinks about putting the telly on, but the thought of other people—loud, happy people, chattering away from a world where you could go out in the sun and your best mates were safe and whole and human—made him feel almost sick.

“Nick?”

“Yeah?”

“What am I going to do?”

“Well,” Nick takes a breath, “I have some, uh, plasters in the cupboard, and you can stay at mine today, and we’ll tell your mum that, um, that you were attacked by a rampaging cat or something—”

“Nick.” Stu sat up a bit and looked at him. “Earlier I almost turned into a fucking _wolf_ because someone left their indicator on.”

“Oh.”

“I shouldn’t—I mean, from what Anton said, it’s like—like a fucked-up kind of canine _puberty_ , I mean, I shouldn’t even be here, with you, it’s a miracle I haven’t torn this place apart, torn you open—”

“You’re not going to.”

“You don’t—”

“You’re _not_.”

Stu looks down and half-clenches his fists, and he’s half-crying, too, the tears forcing their way out. They’ve been friends since before Nick can remember, but he’s never seen Stu cry, not before tonight.

“I didn’t kill you,” says Nick, which makes Stu look at him again. “I’m—I’m a vampire, and vampires kill people. And you’re—you’re a werewolf. And werewolves kill people. But I didn’t kill you. And you’re not going to kill me.”

“You didn’t.” Stu rubs his thumb over a scar on the back of his other hand.

“I didn’t.” Nick grins. “Even though you smell like a fucking steak pie.”

That makes Stu laugh, even if it’s a bit shakily. “Do I, still?”

That makes Nick pause. He’s gotten used to regulating his breathing around Stu, keeping it shallow, forcing himself not to notice it — but now he lets himself breathe in the smell of his friend, sitting so close to him.

Stu doesn’t smell like a human anymore. He still smells like _Stu_ , though, even though it’s overlaid a bit with dog-and-blood, and Nick realises it’s something he hasn’t been able to, if he’s being honest with himself, appreciate for so long, because it’s been all covered over with _fresh delicious sweet intoxicating_ . Now he remembers: Stu smells like three-in-one shampoo and spaghetti bolognese and his old dusty computer room. Like _himself_.

“No. You don’t.”

Tentatively, Nick puts an arm around Stu’s shoulder. It’s a rare intimacy between them — sometimes Nick envies the girls he sees at clubs, hugging and kissing each other without a second thought—and one he had never risked these past few months, fearing the pulse of Stu’s life so irresistibly close.

Stu leans in, just a bit.

“Well. That’s one good thing to come from all of this,” he says, smiling, but with a bitter edge.

“One?” Nick pulls back, staring at him. “Stu. You’re _alive_.”

He can guess, seeing Stu look down at himself, at the sofa cushions, what he’s thinking. He can tell that he’s weighing in his mind exactly what a _good thing_ is, the way he had done on his first night-as-day, walking through a city hushed and still, as if he had woken up the last man on Earth.

What the fuck is there to say? Stu’s wearing a dressing-gown, one of Anton’s old ones, and it’s come loose at the waist and he can see most of his chest and collarbones, and the raw, red gashes across them. Not bleeding, though. Healing.

“Deacon told me,” he begins, slowly, “when you—” how to say it—“when we thought you’d died, about being a vampire, and, y’know, immortal, and watching the people you—love—die. And when he was talking about seeing them getting old and all of that shit, it was you. It was you, Stu, that I was thinking about.”

He can’t look at him, not in the eye. Too close, too dangerously close.

“And I think he was trying to make me feel better,” he went on, looking at the fresh scars, and seeing what he isn’t sure if he had seen or if his brain had made for him in a nightmare: the scars as open wounds, the awful slick shine of blood and entrails. “But I didn’t, because all I could think was that I wanted it all. All the years. With you.” He’s crying now, shit, “so, I guess I’m selfish, but I’m so fucking glad. That you’re—you’re a werewolf. That you’re alive.”

Before he can stop himself, he reaches out a shaking finger to brush the claw-mark that bisects Stu’s chest, that had revealed his heart. Stu catches it. But he doesn’t move it away.

“I’m alive,” he says, and kisses him.

And Stu’s alive, and Nick’s alive. Not technically. But in all the ways the matter.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this instead of studying for exams. Anything for you, Stu.


End file.
